New writing goes back to its roots this week with new poetry from Gil Lawson

Getting Over It w/ Conscientious Jane

1.
i’m standing on a hill of dust
underneath the Manhattan Bridge
at around three in the morning
on july 19, 2014. before me there’s
a decline as the hill concaves down
to an empty pavement lot which stretches
for maybe thirty meters, then an empty
gate which hangs loose
for me. through the gate extends
a pale narrow arm holding
a chintzy disposable
camera. through all that empty
space the shutter snaps. behind the human
there is a series of cement objects,
a short span of water,
some other boroughs. the shutter snaps again,
temporalizing what could have passed
for a static description, colors and edges
delineating
outward from the hill of dust,
its shruggy grey impure with halogen.
i step geometrically outward,
descend - similar - down,
and am analogized by the
pattern of erosion, my feet
in dust up to my ankles.
then compression and humidity
angle me down. at the bottom i step out
of the hill—the dust has fully excoriated
my feet, tendon, sinew and gore.
i pad bloodly back across the lot.
in two hours when i remove my jeans
dust and other things explode out of
my cuffs across the floor, i clean it
drunkenly. dust is mostly—anyway,
earlier the peanut gallery
assembled photographs,
fore and aft
while we intimated
near the water—
my synaptic
cleft (implausibility):
i peace-signed, pouted,
the human swore
then evacuated
asking how that
could be chill.
the next day the time
behaves the same, a
privileged height disparity,
long empty zone
i crossed to get here,
the suggestion
of an arm—a dozen
things i have to cross.
i cross them all
unhappily
but i cross them.

2.
a few days later i vibrate thickly to life
beneath flannel sheets
just off franklin. im so casual and sweaty
but enough about that—
for the past four months there have been
three flowerboxes outside my windows,
i look at them each morning. one is fine;
one has a pumpkin, rotting, since I moved in
in april i don’t dare move, it predates me;
the last, eked into the small space
behind the a.c. is full of dead things
that lived before the a.c.
the steady emission of air destroyed
their shitty little bodies, whatever
airborne weeds got collected
that far up. for seven months
i’ve been sleeping alone. for three weeks
i haven’t smoked a wink. for
about that time i’ve been undergoing
a firm rearrangement of
the affective response i feel
in light of given names on
facebook, gchat, my inbox, wherein
digital options of desire re:
breaking invis, like a shell—
first with the shape of my initial foray;
then hemorrhaging the fluid, both
in the sense of my ruined privacy
and
my unmanageable confessionalism, where any detail
runs out openly, im always hoping
the fact brigade i breed
creates a sense of psychic debt which gets repaid
either by the cc’s own personal facts (we can
just call it leverage)
or by the information i need to know about
transactions in which im uninvolved
out in the world—are toggling around
configurations . . . the impulsivity doesn’t change.
rather, for those cases in which there’s some movement
the initial response turns out to be inaccurate
so every time i want to break the shell, or strongly no,
i have to match that to the scorecard.
the A is usually just chill.
i mean im told the big deathbed regret
is impassivity but tbh so far its mostly fine.
i rise, observe the flowerboxes,
shower, think about you,
sit and think about you,
forget to eat, grow thinner over time.
for seven months i’ve been
sleeping alone.
this absence, an airlessness
of scheduling around my cavities
is so, so firm and jellied,
it makes me dressed forever
so far as anyone’s concerned.
that clear barrier of dressing-time
—dividing
seeing and not being seen—
is, like Jupiter, enormous. i sleep
alone because i’m sleeping alone,
it takes a dreadnought
to puncture that space and let all my effluvium
of kindness, generosity, ideas of ‘owing’
and ‘abuse’ to run
into the middle distance. it makes a
1970’s small monster object
there, which rotates its head very slowly
its wax head
its bad rubber head, you can hear the engine
whining, someone yelling cut.
imaging men developing
marketable fright.
the space outside the egg both of which
are the shape of sleeping alone rotates its head
to face me like that.
after the space in time
that ain’t breakfast
nick wakes a few
subway stops down
crawling out from
under his blanket
of house centipedes
demanding food
gluttonous nick
crazy gluttonous nick
we used to eat sushi
and now you’re two
kind bars. crazy nick
i’m going to say “i booby-
trapped your bed so
when you lie down it
will kill you” and you’ll
know exactly what i mean.
oh yes.
you’ll know exactly
exactly what
i mean.
my friend nick.
but i won’t have time:
the day sprang
and died in the palm of the morning.
now i’m curled in ikea,
feverish, fretting, only
moving farther
from putting
anything
together. tylenol pm puts
me, vibrating, down
to sleep alone
again another month
a year a personality a person
can learn to live like this
can stop living like almost anything
can stop learning like everything
can stop
or i assume as much.

Gil Lawson is from Santa Fe, NM. His work has been published by (or is forthcoming from) n+1, Triple Canopy, Metazen, Hypocrite Reader, and others. He works as a travel editor at TripExpert.

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